I imagine that folks in these here forums are engaged both in writing and creating books, so I thought I’d post this broadside announcing the establishment of a private press by William Everson...in the city of Berkeley. 19¾x11¼. One of 500 copies printed on Strathmore paper. I found it while surfing for some beat texts in google newsgroups.

Everson begins “As a creative man, the richest thing I can do is to write a poem, and the next is to print it. Out of that parallelism springs ‘The Equinox Press.’ The one flows from the other, gives it tangibility, a further dimension. One the page a poem achieves its final form, and goes out to take its place, if it is worth it, in the consciousness of men.”

And then continues:

What happens on the page for the eye is certainly next in importance to what happens for the ear, and one concerned in all the aspects of his poem follows that concern naturally from the manu_script_ to the book: not so much to insure its correctness, but simply to create there, to let his hand participate also in what was of such consequence to him, and so to resolve there one more of his deep-set needs.

Folllows, then the hand-press, because it is capable of measuring up to all the idealism a man can bring to it, because the human hand is evidenced in it, and because its tradition holds within it the finest achievements of the bookman’s craft.

Follows then, the quarto, chosen because it is ample, and a poem needs amplitude; a type-size large enough so that each letter exists in its own form in the eye, permitting a boldness and masculinity of treatment; hand-made paper, when it can be had, printed damp to attain that dense, lustrous black, set off with rich reds, the true typographical colors; and so conceived in design as to render the impact of modernity, but scanting its exaggerations -- a conscious attempt, as exemplified on this page, to integrate the handwork of the past and the temper of the present.

I have ready for the press three series of poems, completed since those of the cumulative edition announced by Mr. James Laughlin of New Directions for the Spring of 1948. I shall begin shortly upon the first of these. They will be issued separately in slender quarto, with block prints by Mary Fabilli, the size of the edition being governed by the ease with which the sheets can be worked upon the press, and will be offered at prices commensurate with their quality, but with the understanding that the poems will later be issued by a regular publisher. What lies beyond them rests with my pen, and the insight to create. For we live to create, out of our love of life, and of one another, and our sense of consequence in our own time, affirming that joy we hold as men and women, inhabitants of the earth, its commonality, who may, in the magnitude of God, achieve the plenitude of Man.

Autumn, 1947.

This item was recently sold at auction, check out the page here.

Here's a scan: